DUSTWUN

DUSTWUN is one of those acronyms that I had heard before, but just at five years ago I was one of many soldiers that became involved in the actual search mission for four soldiers in this status. DUSTWUN or duty status whereabouts unknown is the classification a soldier is placed before they officially become Missing in Action (MIA). 

The unit these soldiers were assigned to didn't have an aviation element so for a couple of weeks before a unit became co-located with them our crews were on 24 hour support for anything this unit needed.  Due to the nature of the mission, we were split in 12 hour shifts and were authorized to fly that whole time, which took the authorization of a general.  Bottom line, they wanted these soldiers home. 

These soldiers had been providing overwatch due to some suspicious activity, but later it was determined that the 'suspicious activity' was a ploy to get a unit out to that location where the enemy could ambush them, which is exactly what ended up happening.  One of the soldiers was found shortly after and his body had been set up to conceal a bomb.  They search for the other three soldiers continued on. 

I was on the DUSTWUN mission twice during those first few weeks.  One day shift and one night shift.  As with any military mission, everything is always subject to change.  We were doing some standard personnel movements during the day shift, as we were coming in to drop off some of the passengers, over the radio we received word that there were new orders and we needed to drop all pax (passengers) upon landing and we would be further briefed at that time.  One of the senior officers for the battalion there came out and took over my ICS (the intercom system for the crew to speak to one another) while I worked on unloading our current passengers and helping what appeared to be a group of infantry soldiers get loaded and secured.

I hooked back up to the ICS and was filled in on what was going on.  We were doing a daytime air assault (which is extremely rare due to the threat).  There was a local sitting in the seat next to my crew seat and they informed me that this guy has been able to identify the three missing soldiers, which to this point names and pictures had not been put out for security reasons.  He had told the individuals interrogating him that he had buried these soldiers at a certain grid coordinate and that's where we were heading.  As we were flying out there, my anger started spiking...  I didn't care what this guys role was in the situation, but as far as I was concerned he had blood on his hands!

As we landed out at the location this guy had identified, I noticed some trucks pulling up in the distance.  We were out in the middle of nowhere and there was just a few small buildings.  Where these trucks had pulled up was out in the middle of the desert, so something was off.  As we were taking off, I looked again and noticed that there were at least five guys that had unloaded from these trucks and they were uncovering something in the bed of their truck... something wasn't right.  I said something to our pilots and we flew over them again hoping to scare them off, but they didn't budge.   At that point in time I realized what they were uncovering - weapons.  These soldiers had been lead into an ambush, but this time they had support.  Two Apaches were inbound, less than two minutes out.  So we remained on scene and I had my 240 on target and ready to fire if given the order. 

The apaches arrived as we kept watch and our pilot made the call to let the gun ships take over, so we headed back to base.  As we were flying away, through the radio traffic we could hear that the pilots of the gun ships had confirmed what I had seen and shortly after that you could see that they had ended this attempted attack. 

Nothing was found out at that location by the soldiers, it was simply another attempt to attack soldiers.  Needless to say, the local they had taken out there remained in captivity.